But, Ammann — who spent decades in the medical field — began to create photo montages as a way to process the “deeply disturbing” things he’d seen while working with HIV-infected women in Africa through his nonprofit, Global Strategies.

He couldn’t forget seeing clinics in the Congo where rebels had destroyed hospital supplies, or the lines of women carrying their possessions on their backs fleeing with their children from villages that rebels had looted and burned.

“I wanted to say (to them), ‘Everything is going to be OK,’ realizing it wasn’t,” he says.

For years, the San Rafael resident kept these works to himself, but with encouragement he first showed his works publicly in a solo exhibit, “HIV: A Plague of Violence Against Women,” earlier this year at the UCSF Parnassus Library in San Francisco. Five of his works are featured in “80 over 80,” an exhibit of more than 80 works from Marin artists that are aged 80 and older at the Bartolini Gallery in San Rafael.

The “80 over 80” exhibit celebrates “the senior artists who have had incredibly illustrious careers as artists in every genre,” says Libby Garrison, marketing and communications manager for the county’s Department of Cultural Services.

In his works, Ammann seeks to show how HIV is not a consequence of an epidemic, but rather a consequence of violence against women and children.

“HIV infection in women primarily comes from violent, sexual relationships, certainly not consensual,” says Ammann, 82. “I don’t know of any circumstances where there is a consensual HIV infection. No women that I’ve met would agree to be HIV infected.”

“Abandon” includes photos he took of a rowboat in San Rafael’s China Camp State Park, an HIV-infected woman with her baby, a statue of Jesus with hands bound by rope and a church.

“There’s a woman who has no access, who has been abandoned, not only by the community but in many cases by the church itself,” he says of the work.

Next to some of his photo montages are placards containing the words of the assaulted women.

“I regret my life to be eroded,” writes Gloria, of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is pregnant and HIV-infected after having been raped at age 16. “I will have nothing to say in my family and to my friends. I would not be married because all the boys know that I was raped. I feel worthless in front of my family and friends. Death is near.”

“It’s a very sobering responsibility,” Ammann says of highlighting the women’s stories. “I can at least do this to honor what’s happened to them, and try to bring help to others so that there are not more stories like the ones we are telling.”

Juror Donna Seager was moved by the works.

“I thought it was wonderful that a man put these photographs together about these abuses to women,” says Seager, co-owner of Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley. “Even though they are beautiful, he doesn’t gloss over the ugly truth.”

‘Nothing happened’

After he helped create the first vaccine to prevent pneumococcal infection in 1977, the self-proclaimed idealist was surprised to see that after this discovery “nothing happened in the rest of the world.”

“I was traveling to poor countries, and they just didn’t put it as a priority to give it to infants and children,” Ammann says. “I learned early at that time, that when we make discoveries, that the weakest part is the implementation of the research results.”

This was still the case when he later started doing HIV research, discovering two of the three ways that HIV is transmitted, which would lead scientists to discover how to prevent the transmission of the virus. Again, he saw how these life-saving measures weren’t being implemented in poor countries.

He decided to do something about it. He left his job at Genentech and created Global Strategies for HIV Prevention in 1999, venturing into unstable countries avoided by many organizations. He worked with doctors, health-care professionals and indigenous leaders to set up programs in places like the Congo, Zimbabwe and Liberia, and now has the largest pediatric HIV program in eastern Congo.

“We are not doing earth-shaking research and trying to solve problems of mankind,” Ammann says. “What we are trying to do is take known solutions and implement them in very under-resourced areas.”

Being an advocate

At the core of his work is his desire to advocate for women and children. He says he was driven by a sense of justice as he grew up and during his medical training in New Jersey, when he saw how opportunities came to young men like him.

“I saw the populations getting neglected over and over again were women and children,” he says. “My own religious training and teaching was saying the same thing, certain populations need defense, and who is going to defend them.”

With his photo montages, Ammann hopes to call attention to conditions he believes should not exist.

“The world is being lulled or fooled into the fact that this epidemic through science can be stopped,” he says. “It won’t be stopped unless violence against women is stopped.”